CINEMATIC REVELATIONS allows me the luxury of writing, editing and archiving my film and television reviews. Some reviews appeared initially in "The Commercial Dispatch" and "The Planet Weekly" and then later in the comment archives at the Internet Movie Database. IMDB.COM, however, imposes a limit on both the number of words and the number of times that an author may revise their comments. I hope that anybody who peruses these expanded reviews will find them useful.

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Wednesday, January 6, 2016

You've never seen actor David McCallum play a more anti-heroic
character than in director Brian G. Hutton's above-average narcotics
thriller "Sol Madrid." McCallum headlines the cast as the eponymous protagonist
who works undercover for Interpol and lives to bust illegal drug dealers.
Indeed, he believes that he shouldn't have to abide by the rules because the
bad guys don't. The biggest heroin dealer of them all here is Emil Dietrich.
"Dirty Dozen" psycho Telly Savalas is charming as the
cigarette-smoking villain who lives high, wide, and handsome in his estate in
sunny Acapulco, Mexico. Initially, our hero doesn't have his sights set on the
urbane Dietrich. He learns from his Interpol superior that the mistress of a Mafioso
kingpin, Dano Villanova (Rip Torn of "Men in Black"), has left him.
Moreover, the man with a computerized mind who knows everything about the
Mafia's accounts, Harry Mitchell (Pat Hingle of "Hang'em High") has
fled from the Mafia, too. At first, Sol's mission is to find Mitchell and
persuade him to testify against the Mafia. Stacey Woodward (Stella Stevens of
"The Ballad of Cable Hogue"), joined Mitchell for $250-thousand dollars.
but she didn't accompnay him to Mexico. Sol Madrid breaks into Woodward's
bedroom, surprises her, confiscates her loot, and they head off to see Dietrich
and his guest Mitchell. Madrid works his way into Dietrich's confidence when he
manages to smuggle heroin into California by means of an oil pipeline. The
Interpol agent reels in Dietrich afterward for $25 million. Meanwhile, another
Interpol agent working undercover in Acapulco is a smiling dude known as
Jalisco (Ricardo Montalban of "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan"), and he
works as a cabbie when he isn't crusading for law and order. Eventually, Madrid
is able to persuade Dietrich to sell him heroin on the premises of his house,
something that Dietrich had never done before. During the big bust scene, our
hero gets into a fight with the villain, and you can guess who survives the
confrontation. Sol Madrid emerges as one of those cops who doesn't take
prisoners and he isn't afraid of anything. Eventually, he is able to rescue
Stacey from the mitts of the mafia. Once the evil Villanova ferrets Stacey out,
he incarcerates her in a cabin and gets her hooked on heroin.

What sets "Sol Madrid" (*** OUT OF ****) apart from all of McCallum's
other films is the savagery of his character. He exposes a double-agent in one
scene and shoots the man at point blank range without a qualm and lets him fall
down and die. Later, he tangles with a well-dressed Mafioso and drowns the
dastard face down in a muddy pool in Mexico. I don't think that I've ever seen
David McCallum play a character as brutal of Sol Madrid, and he displays no
remorse for his murderous behavior. "Sol Madrid" was released by
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer a year before Hutton made history with Richard Burton and
Clint Eastwood in the explosive World War II thriller "Where Eagles
Dare." Hutton's next film was "Kelly's Heroes. If you want to see
David McCallum as you have never seen him before, check out "Sol
Madrid."